I think one of the benefits of Gov. Mike Pence's win over challenger John Gregg is that Pence's idea for education enhancement will prevail instead of Gregg's, so we're going to see an emphasis on improving vocational and technical education instead of a push for more early childhood education. There will still be people nagging us about this, of course, and President Obama's call for universal pre-K will give them encouragement. Too bad:
The idea that kids should learn to read, write, and add when they are very young has been thoroughly disproven, and in fact, this sort of structured evinronment is so bad for boys that it puts them on an early path to being labeled low performers. This is why the rich don’t even bother with preschool—they know their kids will be fine without it. And almost all the research to support preschool is based on lower-income statistics, like preschool keeps kids out of prison.
Kids want to be with their parents when they are young, and given the choice, 84% of women would rather be home with their kids than work full-time. The universal preschool proposal ignores the needs of both these constitutent groups.
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This country is already an absolute mess because we funnel kids through an education system for fifteen years to get to a college system that is a ponzi scheme. Even the research that supports preschool concludes that an all-around lousy school system undermines the positive impact of preschool.
We need to admit that kids do not need to go to our schools to be educated. One of the largest education trends is middle class parents taking kids out of school. The most expensive private schools model a homeschool environment because kids can learn through self-directed exploration. They don’t need school.
Middle class parents recognize this and don’t want their kids to suffer through an antiquated education system that was established to educate kids to be factory workers.
Early childhood education is one of those things that sound so good they must be true, so it seems almost brutish to oppose them. Those are precisely the issues on which we should slow down and examine the evidence.
